/lit/ - Literature

oh boy you guys will love this

http://thequietus.com/articles/09145-radiohead-ok-computer-paul-morley-review-rocks-backpages

this guy writes like...I dont even know how to describe it just read it, its a review of OK Computer

>Isn't It Romantic?
>No.

>>4785379
Im rereading this now I desperately want you all to read it, heres an excerpt:

But it seems most everyone wants everything rated these days. Who am I to disagree? So if I had to mark Radiohead's scrupulously shapeless new album – where pitiless gloom, demented sentiment and scabby poignancy tease out and tear apart your bleak dream avant-pop assemblage of Samuel Beckett, Lou Reed and Harry fucking Nilsson, where compressed desolation, deadpan pain and mirrored pop meet up to compare bent notes on the general destiny of futility, where great pop is luminously demonstrated as being the fitted and startled miscellany of apprehension and transcendence – I will give it a star.

>>4785389
muh purple prose

>>4785393
its not even purple its fucking glowing neon magenta
that articles has to be one of the most entertaining things ive ever read

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI

>>4785379
woah nigga i can't understand a word of that

I don't know about my favorite, but I'll post some memorable funny ones.

>Thackeray wrote a skittish, fast-moving parody of romantic, sentimental writing. It was about the adventures of an Irish knave who used British hypocrisy for leverage. However, it must have been Barry Lyndon's ruthless pursuit of wealth and social position rather than his spirit that attracted Stanley Kubrick. His images are fastidiously delicate in the inexpressive, peculiarly chilly manner of the English painters of the period-the mid-18th century-and it's an ice-pack of a movie, a masterpiece in every insignificant detail. Kubrick suppresses most of the active elements that make movies pleasurable. The film says that people are disgusting but things are lovely. And a narrator (Sir Michael Hordern) tells you what's going to happen before you see it. It's a coffee-table movie; the stately tour of European high life is like a three-hour slide show for art-history majors.

>“The Ghost and the Darkness” is an African adventure that makes the Tarzan movies look subtle and realistic. It lacks even the usual charm of being so bad it's funny. It's just bad. Not funny. No, wait . . . there is one funny moment. A bridge-builder takes leave of his pregnant wife to go to Africa to build a bridge, and she solemnly observes, “You must go where the rivers are.”

>>4785724
I really enjoyed that.

>It features MTV motivation: I pose, therefore I am. The strapping Kelly McGillis is an astrophysicist employed to teach the elite fighter pilots in training at San Diego's Miramar Naval Air Station; she sidles into rooms and slouches, so she won't overpower her co-star, the relatively diminutive Tom Cruise, who is supposed to be the most daring of her students. When McGillis is offscreen, the movie is a shiny homoerotic commercial: the pilots strut around the locker room, towels hanging precariously from their waists. It's as if masculinity had been redefined as how a young man looks with his clothes half off, and as if narcissism is what being a warrior is all about. In between the bare-chested maneuvers, there's footage of ugly snub-nosed jets taking off, whooshing around in the sky, and landing while the sound track calls up Armageddon and the Second Coming--though what we're seeing is training exercises. What is the movie selling? It's just selling, because that's what the producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and the director, Tony ("Make It Glow") Scott, know how to do. Selling is what they think moviemaking is about. The result is a new "art" form: the self-referential commercial.

>>4785731
>A bridge-builder takes leave of his pregnant wife to go to Africa to build a bridge, and she solemnly observes, “You must go where the rivers are

I sincerely hope to one day write something this good

>>4785724
Godly. Especially Reverend Runt.

>>4786054
Yep. Godly as in good content. Great content. Meaty. Like a penis, not a gaping hole between your legs.

>>4785379

Doesn't have shit on p4k's review of Kid A:

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6656-kid-a/

>I had never even seen a shooting star before. 25 years of rotations, passes through comets' paths, and travel, and to my memory I had never witnessed burning debris scratch across the night sky. Radiohead were hunched over their instruments. Thom Yorke slowly beat on a grand piano, singing, eyes closed, into his microphone like he was trying to kiss around a big nose. Colin Greenwood tapped patiently on a double bass, waiting for his cue. White pearls of arena light swam over their faces. A lazy disco light spilled artificial constellations inside the aluminum cove of the makeshift stage. The metal skeleton of the stage ate one end of Florence's Piazza Santa Croce, on the steps of the Santa Croce Cathedral. Michelangelo's bones and cobblestone laid beneath. I stared entranced, soaking in Radiohead's new material, chiseling each sound into the best functioning parts of my brain which would be the only sound system for the material for months.

Only the beginning.

Burkas and Birkins; Lindy West murders Sex and the City 2

>Sex and the City 2 makes Phyllis Schlafly look like Andrea Dworkin. Or that super-masculine version of Cynthia Nixon that Cynthia Nixon dates. Or, like, Ralph Nader (wait, bad example—Schlafly totally does look like Ralph Nader in a granny wig). SATC2 takes everything that I hold dear as a woman and as a human—working hard, contributing to society, not being an entitled cunt like it's my job—and rapes it to death with a stiletto that costs more than my car. It is 146 minutes long, which means that I entered the theater in the bloom of youth and emerged with a family of field mice living in my long, white mustache. This is an entirely inappropriate length for what is essentially a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls. But I digress. Let us start with the "plot."

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/burkas-and-birkins/Content?oid=4132715

Mark Kermode on Pirates of the Caribbean 3 is pretty funny too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYfbc1B-i4I

>>4786057
wtf dude

>>4786065
>Radiohead were ready to abandon pop after OK Computer. The production aspects of music were beginning to prevail over the music, so why not make them "the" music? The sound of Kid A (Capitol, 2000) has decomposed and absorbed countless new perfumes, like a carcass in the woods. All sounds are processed and mixed, including the vocals. Radiohead move as close to electronica as possible without actually endorsing it.

>The first half of the album is their most ephemeral and artificial work ever: the ethereal vocal psalm of Everything In Its Right Place, the distorted musicbox of Kid A (which is virtually a remix of Kraftwerk's Radioland), the controlled horns nightmare over pounding drums and bass of The National Anthem (perhaps the boldest piece here), the new-age orchestration of How To Disappear Completely are songs only because they are sung. What they truly are is flexible structures for creative arrangements; mood-pieces in the vein of late Pink Floyd, with intellectual sprinkles of Brian Eno, David Byrne, Robert Fripp, etc; muzak for those who missed the story of rock music.

>The second half of the album, following the brief ambient instrumental Treefingers, is more personal, as lyrics start unraveling angst and anger. And, suddenly, this sounds like Radiohead's more humane work. This sequence, from the distorted guitars and tribal beat of Optimist to the languid jazz-rock breeze of In Limbo to the futuristic, post-industrial spiritual of Idioteque to the Can-meets-Tim Buckley ambiance of Morning Bell to the celestial harps, accordions and synthesizers of Motion Picture Soundtrack, is almost a progression from earthly matters to heavenly matters. In fact, this album is as good (at what it does) as the celebrated OK Computer, if not even more inventive, unpredictable and baroque.

>Radiohead are masters of the artificial. Their parable crowns a long tradition in British rock music of putting form before content, of concentrating on "sound" to the expense of "music".

>When it came out, Kid A was saluted as a masterpiece by the international critics, but a few months later critics who were still willing to define it a "masterpiece" could be packed in a Japanese subcompact car. The problem is that there is precious little to write about Radiohead's songs. The interest they generate recalls the frenzy surrounding each of Bowie's "masterpieces", works that were manufactured ad hoc (by the greatest rock communicator ever) to induce intellectual excitement (to disorient) in order to hide what little substance the music had. Something similar is happening with Radiohead's albums. Each collection is well-crafted and intriguing, for the sake of being well-crafted and intriguing. But little else. If the band has a personality, it is not clear what it is.

>>4786068
>criticizing Sex and the City 2

That takes balls.

>>4786071
>to induce intellectual excitement (to disorient)

damn...

>>4786074

Oh, I didn't realize this thread was about having balls. Here's a pair for you.

James Wood's review of Updike's novel, Terrorist.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/jihad-and-the-novel

>>4786068
Lindy West is a lesbian basher.

Not surprising.

>>4786090
>tfw I'm to weak to click on a link

>>4786094
>tfw i'm to weak to type two o's

Harry Knowles' review of Blade II has to be one of the most entertainingly stupid pieces of shit I have ever read.

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/11793

>But having attended the World Premiere of BLADE 2 last night, one inescapable thought crossed my mind during the movie. 10 to 1…. I believe Guillermo Del Toro eats pussy better than any man alive.

>>4786097
That's as cool as it gets?

armond white is the best person
http://www.nyfcc.com/2013/05/bay-watch-armond-whites-transformers-2-review-for-cityarts/

>In the history of motion pictures, Bay creates the best canted angles–ever. The world looms behind a human protagonist with the enormity of life itself. (My favorite: a windblown Megan Fox facing the audience as a jet fighter slowly, majestically glides behind/above her”). Bay already has a signature: the up-tilted 360-degree spin (gleefully parodied in Hot Fuzz). Here, he flashes it whenever Sam kisses his girlfriend. Bay photographs Fox and luscious/vicious rival Isabel Lucas like pin-ups–a pop culture joke encompassing what every young girl, post-Madonna, is told is OK. (They’re girls “with options” as Sam says.) There’s still advertising porn in Bay’s soul but it’s so expressive of the media norm that it’s funny–proof we’re watching nothing more than fantasy. This commercialized lifeforce “Cannot be destroyed, only transformed” (as a Decepticon warns). Transforming is the capitalist dream of re-branding. It’s not transcendence–thus, the need for the basic sci-fi story of good vs. evil where Revenge of the Fallen alludes to the story of Lucifer.

The red letter media fat guy about new star wars movies

No really, check it and tell me why is not the best review ever about a movie (or three, in this case)

>The central and virtually the only characters are two little cousins; shipwrecked, they grow up alone together on a South Seas island, and turn into Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins. The film has an inevitable, built-in prurience. All we have to look forward to is: When are these two going to discover fornication? The director, Randal Kleiser, and his scenarist, Douglas Day Stewart, have made the two clean and innocent by emptying them of any dramatic interest. Watching them is about as exciting as looking into a fishbowl waiting for guppies to mate. It's Disney nature porn. The cinematography, by Nestor Almendros, is so inexpressive that we seem to be looking at the scenic wonders of a vacation spa in a travelogue.

>Terrence Malick wrote and directed this story of adultery, set principally in the wheat fields of the Texas Panhandle just before America entered the First World War. It's both a nostalgic and an anti-nostalgic vision of the American past. The landscapes are vast and lonely, with the space in the images strained and the figures tilted; the characters are monosyllabic-near-mute. What is unspoken in this picture weighs heavily on us, but we're not quite sure what it is. The film is an empty Christmas tree: you can hang all your dumb metaphors on it. Richard Gere plays Bill, who works in a blast furnace in Chicago; he gets into a brawl with the foreman and heads south, taking his girl, Abby (Brooke Adams), and his 12-year-old sister, Linda (Linda Manz), with him. They find work in the fields of a wealthy young farmer (Sam Shepard), who falls in love with Abby. When Bill learns that the farmer may be dying, he encourages Abby to marry him-so that she can soon be a rich widow. The movie is oblique, except for the narration, which is by Linda; she's a little-girl wise guy, and all the humor in the film comes from her laconic remarks, but she's also precociously full of the wisdom of the ages, and at times her illiterate poetry is drenched in wistfulness and heartbreak. Shot by Nestor Almendros, with additional photography by Haskell Wexler, the film is a series of pictorial effects-some of them, such as a train passing over a lacework bridge, extraordinary-but the overpowering images seem unrelated, pieced together. The movie suffers from too many touches, too many ideas that don't grow out of anything organic. It's an epic pastiche. Though the irregularly handsome, slightly snaggletoothed Shepard has almost no lines, he makes a strong impression; he seems authentically an American of an earlier era. But Gere, with his post-50s acting style and the associations it carries of Brando and Dean and Clift and all the others who shrugged and scowled and acted with their shoulders, is anachronistic.

>Robert Bresson's masterly adaptation of the Georges Bernanos novel about the suffering of a young priest (Claude Laydu) whose faith is neither understood nor accepted by his parishioners. A film of great purity and, at the end, a Bach-like intensity. The dialogue and the passages read from the diary are taken directly from the novel, though while you're watching you feel as if you were seeing a silent movie. (It's the effect of the expressive images and the general austerity.) This is one of the few modern works in any art form that help one to understand the religious life-which for this useless young man is a terrible one, yet with moments of holiness. If there is a flaw in the film it's the rhythm-you feel you're dying with the priest. The film may raise a question in your mind: Does Bresson know what a pain this young man is? The priest's austere spirituality may give the community the same sort of pain that Bresson's later movies give some of us in the audience.

>A wonderful movie, set in Baltimore, around Christmas of 1959. A fluctuating group of five or six young men in their early 20s hang out together; they've known each other since high school, and though they're moving in different directions, they still cling to their late-night bull sessions at the diner-where, magically, they always seem to have plenty to talk about. It's like a comedy club-they take off from each other, and their conversations are all overlapping jokes that are funny without punch lines. Conversations may roll on all night, and they can sound worldly and sharp, but when these boys are out with girls, they're nervous, constricted, fraudulent, half crazy. Written and directed by Barry Levinson, DINER provides a look at middle-class relations between the sexes just before the sexual revolution, at a time when people still laughed (albeit uneasily) at the gulf between men and women. It isn't remarkable visually but it features some of the best young actors in the country.

>Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin in a farce about two sets of identical twins accidentally mismatched at birth. They're the Ratliffs, who live in a backwoods Southern town, and they're the Sheltons, who run the New York conglomerate Moramax. The four women and their various courtiers, flunkies, and love objects wind up spending the weekend at the Plaza Hotel. (Actually, it's a more spacious, vacuously glamourized Plaza-most of the interiors were constructed at the Disney Studios in Burbank.) The film often looks third class, and the director, Jim Abrahams, doesn't have the knack of making the details click into place. You're aware of an awful lot of mistaken-identity plot and aware of how imprecise most of it is. Yet the picture moves along, spattering the air with throwaway gags, and a minute after something misfires you're laughing out loud. Fred Ward, who plays Tomlin's down-home suitor, is serenely unself-conscious, and takes over as the film's hero. And Midler breezes through, kicking one gong after another. Free and inspired, she plays the poor girl as a supplicant abasing herself before the world's goodies. She's pure appetite. And as the mogul of Moramax she flips up her collar and her gesture bespeaks perfect self-satisfaction. (Chaplin did this sort of thing, and he didn't do it better.)

>This Stanley Kubrick film might be the work of a strict and exacting German professor who set out to make a porno-violent sci-fi comedy. The movie is adapted from Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel, which is set in a vaguely socialist future of the late 70s or early 80s-a dreary, routinized England that roving gangs of teenage thugs terrorize at night. In this dehumanizing society, there seems to be no way for the boys to release their energies except in vandalism and crime. The protagonist, Alex (Malcolm McDowell), is the leader of one of these gangs; he's a conscienceless schoolboy sadist who enjoys stealing, stomping, raping, and destroying, until he kills a woman and is sent to prison. There he is conditioned into a moral robot who becomes nauseated by thoughts of sex and violence. Burgess wrote an ironic fable about a future in which men lose their capacity for moral choice. Kubrick, however, gives us an Alex who is more alive than anybody else in the movie, and younger and more attractive, and McDowell plays him exuberantly, with power and slyness. So at the end, when Alex's bold, aggressive, punk's nature is restored to him, it seems not a joke on all of us (as it does in the book) but, rather, a victory in which we share, and Kubrick takes an exultant tone. Along the way, Alex has been set apart as the hero by making his victims less human than he; the picture plays with violence in an intellectually seductive way-Alex's victims are twisted and incapable of suffering. Kubrick carefully estranges us from these victims so that we can enjoy the rapes and beatings. Alex alone suffers. And how he suffers! He's a male Little Nell-screaming in a strait jacket during the brainwashing; sweet and helpless when rejected by his parents; alone, weeping, on a bridge; beaten, bleeding, lost in a rainstorm; pounding his head on a floor and crying for death. Kubrick pours on the hearts and flowers; what is done to Alex is far worse than what Alex has done, so society itself can be felt to justify Alex's hoodlumism.

>>4785375

J.W.N. Sullivan, the author of the 1927 book Beethoven: His Spiritual Development, said about the overture of Opus 131 “The opening fugue is the most superhuman piece of music that Beethoven has ever written. It is the completely unfaltering rendering into music of what we can only call the mystic vision. It has that serenity which, as Wagner said, speaking of these quartets, passes beyond beauty. Nowhere else in music are we made so aware, as here, of a state of consciousness surpassing our own, where our problems do not exist, and to which even our highest aspirations, those that we can formulate, provide no key. Those faint and troubling intimations we sometimes have of a vision different from and yat including our own, of a way of apprehending life, passionless, perfect and complete, that resolves all our discords, are here presented with the reality they had glimpsed. This impression of a superhuman knowledge, of a superhuman life being slowly frozen into shape, as it were, before our eyes, can be ambiguous. That passionless, remote calm can seem, as it did to Wagner, like a melancholy too profound for any tears. To Berlioz it was terrifying. To Beethoven himself it was the justification of, and the key to, life. In the light of this vision he surveys the world. That this vision was permanent with Beethoven is inconceivable. No men ever lived who could maintain such a state of illumination. This, we may be sure, is the last and greatest of Beethoven's spiritual discoveries, only to be grasped in the moments of his profoundest abstraction from the world.”

He also says:

“Other artists, of those few whose spirits were both sensitive and free, seem to have passed through similar stages of development. But perhaps even Shakespeare never reached that final stage of illumination that is expressed in some of Beethoven's late music. The other steps of the journey he knew, but Shakespeare never wrote his C sharp minor quartet. It is possible, indeed, that Beethoven's late music Is unique, not only in music, but in the whole of art.”

>Allowing for the differences in the wars, this may be one of the post-Vietnam equivalents of the post-Second World War movie THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, which also dealt with returning veterans in smooth, popular terms. Throughout, there's a strong element of self-admiration in the film's anti-Vietnam attitude. The time is 1968; the place is Los Angeles. Jane Fonda plays the proper, repressed wife of a hawkish Marine captain (Bruce Dern); after her husband leaves for Vietnam she volunteers for work in a veterans' hospital and meets a paraplegic (Jon Voight), who is in a rage of helplessness. Then the movie, which started out to be about how the Vietnam war changed Americans, turns into a movie about a woman who has her first orgasm when she goes to bed with a paraplegic, and the porny romanticism of this affair has a morbid kick to it. The musical prelude to the sex is reverential-moviemakers haven't found a slicker way of combining purity and eroticism since Marlene Dietrich unknowingly married a runaway monk (Charles Boyer). Hal Ashby directed this intuitive yet amorphous movie, which falls apart when he resorts to melodramatic crosscutting. Though it was shot by Haskell Wexler, a wizard of fast-moving strong graphics, it has a Waspy glaze to it-a soft pastel innocuousness, as if all those involved were so concerned to get their blandly humanitarian message across without offending anyone that they fogged themselves in.

>>4786734

I don't really like this style of reviewing because it ends up with a lot of empty fanciful words which really aren't very useful at all. It's just a method of film reviewing which I'm too familiar with. I might go as far as to call it elitist and it's so common with older films.

>This is one of the few modern works in any art form that help one to understand the religious life-which for this useless young man is a terrible one

This I do like though. It gives a good description of the character in the film drawing outwards, not simply inwards.

>Travel-folder footage of Rio mixed with father-daughter incest (in a disguised form). The movie is about a 43-year-old father's guilt and confusion because of his affair with his best friend's 15-year-old daughter, who is also his own teenage daughter's best friend. Michael Caine and Joseph Bologna are the fathers who take their daughters (Demi Moore and Michelle Johnson, respectively) for a month's holiday in Rio. On the beach, ogling the bare-breasted women, the fathers see the backs of two beauties, who turn, and their bare-breasted daughters come bobbing over to them, laughing at their discomfort and hugging them. It's as if a Doris Day-Rock Hudson comedy of the early 60s had gone topless. Most of the movie is an attempt to squirm out from under its messy erotic-parental subject. Directed by Stanley Donen, from a final script by Larry Gelbart (a revision of Charlie Peters' version), the picture degenerates into a smarmy sit-com. It oozes self-consciousness. Caine's near-incest keeps him sweating and rushing about anxiously, while the ripe-to-bursting Michelle Johnson pouts and wiggles.

>Autumn leaves and wintry emotions. This is an academic exercise in catharsis; it's earnest, it means to improve people, and it lasts a lifetime. The story is about the Jarretts--Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, and their son, Timothy Hutton--a Protestant family living in an imposing brick house in a wealthy suburb of Chicago. There is so little communication in this uptight family that the three Jarretts sit in virtual silence at the perfectly set dinner table in the perfectly boring big dining room. From time to time, the father, with a nervous tic of a smile, tries to make contact with his son and urges him to see a psychiatrist recommended by the hospital where he was treated after a recent suicide attempt. The movie is about the harm that repression can do, but the movie is just as repressive and sanitized as the way of life it means to expose, and it backs away from anything messier than standard TV-style psychiatric explanations. Making his début as a film director, Robert Redford shows talent with the actors, the younger ones especially; Alvin Sargent's adaptation of the popular Judith Guest novel is heavy on psychobabble. The joker about this movie is that part of the audience weeps for the unloving Wasp-witch mother, who cares only for appearances and who can't change because of the pride and the privacy she was trained in; she seems the gallant last standard-bearer for the Wasp family ethic, and the picture somehow turns into a nosegay for Wasp repression.

>An absorbing but cloudy and unfocussed account of Karen Silkwood's union activism, her contamination by plutonium, and her death in a single-car crash. Directed by Mike Nichols, this passive advocacy film raises suspicions of many kinds of nuclear-age foul play; it's permeated with paranoia and hopelessness. As the heroine, Meryl Streep tousles her shag-cut brown hair, chews gum, and talks with a twang; she eyes a man, her head at an angle. She has the external details of "Okie bad girl" down pat, but something is not quite right. She has no natural vitality; she's like a replicant--all shtick. Her performance is muted, and Nichols, whose work here is erratic, soft-pedals everything around her. Kurt Russell, who plays Karen's lover, is used mostly for his bare chest and his dimples. Cher (as Karen's friend and roommate) has a lovely, dark-lady presence, but she's used as a lesbian Mona Lisa, all faraway smiles and shrugs. It's a wan, weak role. As a cosmetician in a mortuary, Diana Scarwid rouses the audience from its motion-picture-appreciation blues. She gets laughs out of her tight walk and her line readings; when she prolongs syllables and twists meanings, she sounds like Jean Harlow as a Valley Girl. Some scenes appear to relate to passages that have been cut, and the end is chopped short.

>>4785375

A.C. Bradley’s excerpt on Shakespeare:

part 1

“Shakespeare himself erred thus ignorantly, it is very unlikely that in most cases he did so, unless in the first years of his career of authorship. And certainly he never can have thought it artistic to leave inconsistencies, obscurities, or passages of bombast in his work. Most of the defects in his writings must be due to indifference or want of care.

I do not say that all were so. In regard, for example, to his occasional bombast and other errors of diction, it seems hardly doubtful that his perception was sometimes at fault, and that, though he used the English language like no one else, he had not that sureness of taste in words which has been shown by some much smaller writers. And it seems not unlikely that here he suffered from his comparative want of 'learning,' – that is, of familiarity with the great writers of antiquity. But nine-tenths of his defects are not, I believe, the errors of an inspired genius, ignorant of art, but the sins of a great but negligent artist. He was often, no doubt, over-worked and pressed for time. He knew that the immense majority of his audience were incapable of distinguishing between rough and finished work. He often felt the degradation of having to live by pleasing them. Probably in hours of depression he was quite indifferent to fame, and perhaps in another mood the whole business of play-writing seemed to him a little thing. None of these thoughts and feelings influenced him when his subject had caught hold of him. To imagine that then he 'winged his roving flight' for 'gain' or 'glory,' or wrote from any cause on earth but the necessity of expression, with all its pains and raptures, is mere folly. He was possessed: his mind must have been in a white heat: he worked, no doubt, with the furia of Michael Angelo. And if he did not succeed at once – and how can even he have always done so? – he returned to the matter again and again. Such things as the scenes of Duncan's murder or Othello's temptation, such speeches as those of the Duke to Claudio and of Claudio to his sister about death, were not composed in an hour and tossed aside; and if they have defects, they have not what Shakespeare thought defects. Nor is it possible that his astonishingly individual conceptions of character can have been struck out at a heat: prolonged and repeated thought must have gone to them. But of small inconsistencies in the plot he was often quite careless. He seems to have finished off some of his comedies with a hasty and even contemptuous indifference, as if it mattered nothing how the people got married, or even who married whom, so long as enough were married somehow.

>>4786805

part 2

And often, when he came to parts of his scheme that were necessary but not interesting to him, he wrote with a slack hand, like a craftsman of genius who knows that his natural gift and acquired skill will turn out something more than good enough for his audience: wrote probably fluently but certainly negligently, sometimes only half saying what he meant, and sometimes saying the opposite, and now and then, when passion was required, lapsing into bombast because he knew he must heighten his style but would not take the trouble to inflame his imagination. It may truly be said that what injures such passages is not inspiration, but the want of it. But, as they are mostly passages where no poet could expect to be inspired, it is even more true to say that here Shakespeare lacked the conscience of the artist who is determined to make everything as good as he can. Such poets as Milton, Pope, Tennyson, habitually show this conscience. They left probably scarcely anything that they felt they could improve. No one could dream of saying that of Shakespeare.”

>As Faith and George Dunlap, whose marriage has become poisoned because she knows all his weaknesses and failures, and her knowledge eats away at his confidence, Diane Keaton and Albert Finney give the kind of performances that in the theatre become legendary. And, in its smaller dimensions, Dana Hill's performance as their 13-year-old daughter is perhaps equally fine. This unapologetically grown-up movie about separating is perhaps the most revealing American movie of its era. Though the director, Alan Parker, doesn't do anything innovative in technique, it's a modern movie in terms of its consciousness. The characters in the script written by Bo Goldman aren't taken from the movies, or from books, either. Their emotions are raw, and rawness is what makes this film get to you. It goes way past coolness. Diane Keaton has no vanity; Faith's angry misery is almost like a debauch--it makes her appear sodden. And both as a character and as an actor, Finney seems startled and appalled by what has been let loose in him. He's an actor possessed by a great role--pulled into it kicking and screaming, by his own guts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQGrlz9TOGY

>Shoah is a long moan. It's saying 'We've always been oppressed, and we'll be oppressed again.' . . . This is not necessarily an aberrant or irrational notion, and a moan is not an inappropriate response to the history of the Jews. But the lack of a moral complexity in Lanzmann's approach keeps the film from being a great moan. When you're watching [Marcel Ophuls's The Sorrow and the Pity], your perspective spands: you keep changing your mind, and you see that [Ophuls is] changing his, too. You don't just become self-righteous about gloating, mean-spirited peasants and unfeeling Nazi bureaucrats. . . . [Shoah] is exhausting to watch because it closes your mind.

>Stanley Kubrick's gothic about the primal fear of a 5-year-old boy (Danny Lloyd) that his father (Jack Nicholson) will hurt his mother (Shelley Duvall) and him. The father, who wants to write, brings his wife and child to spend the winter in an isolated, snowbound, haunted hotel in Colorado, where he is to be the caretaker--and where he goes mad and acts out his son's fears. Though taken from a pulp best-seller, by Stephen King, the movie isn't the scary fun one might hope for from a virtuoso technician like Kubrick. It has a promising opening sequence, and there is some spectacular use of the Steadicam, but Kubrick isn't interested in the people on the screen as individuals. They are his archetypes, and he's using them to make a metaphysical statement about the timelessness of evil. He's telling us that man is a murderer through eternity. Kubrick's involvement in technology distances us from his meaning, though, and while we're watching the film it just doesn't seem to make sense. Nicholson gives the first hour its buzz, but then his performance begins to seem cramped, slightly robotized; Duvall's performance, however, becomes stronger as the film goes on, and she looks more like a Modigliani than ever.

>>4786805
>>4786811
Is there a phrase for the opposite of "damning with faint praise"? Because this is that.
"Praising with faint damnation" perhaps?

>>4786871
>All that purple prose
I'm not reading all that shit.

>>4785375
NYT Review on Love Guru

>
Ryan Adams, 'Rock N Roll' (Lost Highway)
7
Rock N Roll
Critical Mass

SPIN Rating:7 of 10
Listen:
Spotify

Label: Lost Highway
November 11 2003, 3:00 AM ET
by RJ Smith

Supposedly true thing about Tom Cruise: When he enters a roomful of strangers, he slinks around, scopes out the most charismatic person, and starts copying his or her traits. Whether this means that Cruise has no personality of his own or that he's just a brilliant mimic, who can say? What definitely can be said is that the most charismatic band in New York right now is the Strokes. Ryan Adams is on record as a fan; he once claimed that he was recording a note-for-note version of their album Is This It. Instead, he made Rock N Roll. It's his first real record since 2001's Gold, and, perhaps, a Cruise-like bid to shed the worn flannel of alt country once and for all, step into the Strokes' scuffed Converses, and grab the keys to the city.

>'Why does my heart feel so bad?' Like a neon sign flickering ext to some nameless rural highway, the question appears early on Moby's new album. It's sung by a ghostly figure, most likely black, who is shaken and bewildered but not yet defeated. His words are sampled from someplace in the hazy past, but the anxious classical piano figure accompanying him sounds broadcast live. When a shifty rhythm kicks in, and synthesized strings swell to meet another sampled voice--this one beckoning like a weary gospel singer inside an empty sanctuary--time almost seems to gasp. But Moby, despite his infamously stricken ego, isn't pouting by proxy. As the drag queens down at the punk club said when I was growing up in Georgia, give the boy some room, he's feeling the realness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBCkoDJkIOc

>The singer throws up lyrics about pursuit and desertion. A snare drum lightly skips across a series of bass pinpoints, an organic foundation unthinkable before techno. The song's called "Hunter," and it may actually involve archery. Cellos advance and violins carve out a clearing. High-pitched synthesizer chords flutter through the forest, applying a final hair-spray touch. This could only be Bjork.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiSohz7B0Zo

>>4785379
what in the fuck am I reading

http://www.bigempire.com/filthy/aloneinthedark.html

Imagine how many people pass on a script before it gets to Christian Slater, Tara Reid and Stephen Dorff. There is no casting director in the world who shouts into his Motorola "Get me Slater!" That is, unless theyíre just emerging from a 15-year coma, and even then they yell "Get me Lou Diamond Phillips!" first.

Earlier I would go with DFW's David Lynch and Dostoyevsky review combined to provide a general framework for exactly what the hell he means by New Sincerity.

But because I love the writing of people when they talk about books they love I would go with the whole of Gass' Temple of Texts list.

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/533688-william-gass-s-fifty-literary-pillars

>>4788538
Gass on Kant

>

It is, of course, a commonplace to admire this book, although it is one panel of a mighty triptych. The Critique’s thorny style, its difficult terminology, its original and complex thought drove me crazy when I first tried to cope with it. I wanted to blame Kant for my weakness of intellect, my inadequate background, my flabby character, my toddler’s mind-set, and at college I actually threw my copy through a closed schoolroom window. (I attended school at a time when you could commit such childish things if you paid promptly for the labor and the glass. Beer bottles were often pitched out dorm windows. My breakage had to be a cut above.) The three Critiques, among many large things, do an important small one: they render the difference between the sort of thought and writing which is inherently and necessarily hard and the kind, like Heidegger’s, which forms a soft metaphysical fog around even the easiest and most evident idea.

Gass on Browne's Hydrotaphia
>

The full list, the final role of honor, would include all the great Elizabethan and Jacobean prose writers: Traherne, Milton, Donne, Hobbes, Taylor, Burton, the translators of the King James Bible, and, of course, Browne, or “Sir Style,” as I call him. I would later find them all splendidly discussed in a single chapter of George Saintsbury’s A History of English Prose Rhythm, the chapter he called “The Triumph of the Ornate Style.” Of course, there are great plain styles. Of course, positivists, puritans, democrats, levelers, Luddites, utilitarians, pragmatists, and pushy progressives have something to say for themselves. There are indeed several musicians after Handel and Bach. And there are other mountains beyond Nanga Parbat. But. But the great outburst of English poetry in Shakespeare, in Jonson, in Marlowe, and so on, was paralleled by an equally great outburst of prose, a prose, moreover, not yet astoop to fictional entertainments, but interested, as Montaigne was, in the drama and the dance of ideas. And they had one great obsession: death, for death came early in those days. First light was so often final glimmer. Sir Style is a skeptic; Sir Style is a stroller; Sir Style takes his time; Sir Style broods, no hen more overworked than he; Sir Style makes literary periods as normal folk make water; Sir Style ascends the language as if it were a staircase of nouns; Sir Style would do a whole lot better than this.

>>4788538
>>4788566
>Sir Style ascends the language as if it were a staircase of nouns
You are correct anon.
Criticism is best when it's done by a deeply intelligent person with a love for the text.
That's why I love so much Paradise Lost criticism.

>>4788566
Link to where I can read this online?

>Yeezus (Def Jam, 2013), designed with an incredible number of collaborators, is a sloppy, awkward and amateurish work despite the impeccable fusion of electronics and vocals, the impeccable collages, the impeccable production. But sound quality is a technological, not an artistic, fact. Daft Punk are responsible for the robotic beat of On Sight and the monster riff of Black Skinhead (one of the catchiest "songs"): cool but nothing we haven't heard before. There are a few moments of pathos: the reggae-like cry of I am a God in a desolate post-industrial soundscape, the gloomy crescendo of the first half of Hold My Liquor (before the misguided synth orgy), the martial trombone fanfares of Blood on the Leaves, and... i struggled to find at least one more. But there are also embarrassingly trivial moments of both mashup and sociopolitical analysis (New Slaves, I'm in It, Blood on the Leaves, and Bound 2, which is simply a lame tribute to soul music) and there is certainly an unusual dose of filler (a four-song EP would have been more appropriate for what West had to say in this album). As a narrative experience, these stories may try something new but it's more a case of a populist bard desperately trying to find something new to say to his followers than a serious discussion on gender and race. As an aural experience, this album feels terribly old, like most granpas when they try to speak the language of their high-school nephews. Maybe this album was only meant as a self-mocking joke?

>>4788588
i didn't know people on the internet were aware of sachiko m

lol crazy shit

>>4786871
Xgau actually wrote an OK essay on (literary) postmodernism
http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bkrev/coover-86.php

>>4786270
I love mr plinkett's reviews.
They are hilariously funny, yet very thorough and really well made.
I also enjoy "yourmoviesucks", but that is more for fun, though some of his content is really good.

>>4786090
Any other good James Wood reviews?

>>4788866
I found it from one of the Lit sharethreads in the past.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/nu8073c13rdp846/WG.rar

Includes his nonfiction and two of his fiction books except The Tunnel.

There's only one review that sticks out to me.

The Village Vanguard. New York City. 1961.
We was sittin' there watchin' the stage. Waitin' for the man they called Coltrane to come out and do his thing. It was me and my four droogs. Them bein' Peter, Georgio and Dim; Dim being really Dim.
'Round an hour'd passed and the place was packed straight through to the back. I'd just dropped some dollars for 'Trane's Giant Steps six months back. Now was the time, this was the place. The Village Vanguard. New York City. 1961.
I was only there for the first night, see, but them cats at Impulse! just made my life complete. They put out four CDs of all that sound 'Trane put out those nights. But you know my type, man. Can't afford to eat, let alone spend some heavy cash on music. So I only got the essential. Live at the Village Vanguard: The Master Takes is one disc, makin' it one-fourth the cost of the box set. And you only get the best stuff.
Man, the opening beauty of "Spiritual..." It's like a dream I had: I floated on the River Nile, smokin' some fresh weed, relaxin'. But I ain't ever gonna see the Nile anyhow. This track's as close as I come, and it's close enough. Best of the best, though, has gotta be "India." It's only when you listen to a perfect old jazz tune like this that you realize how much drum-n-bass is derived from this music. 'Trane takes it to heaven and back with some style, man. Some richness, daddy. It's a sad thing his life was cut short by them jaws o' death.
Shit, cat. It don't make a difference. The man produced enough good music to last me a lifetime. This Village Vanguard thing's just another example of the genius of Coltrane.

>>4785379
Doesn't have a single ounce on Lester Bangs though

>

Similarly, Coney Island Baby, fine and indeed heartfelt as it is, is a downs LP. Not putdown involved- Lou's favorite old Velvet songs were always the ballads, and he's got a right to get sweet on himself. Love is silt. Anybody who has ever taken Quaaludes and wound up loving the rest of the human race so much they ended up in bed with a human turnip knows that. The lyrics are better than any Lou-nee Tunes in a while, but not that not since Transformer have so many of them been explicitly preoccupied with the, er, ah . . . "gay" scene. Which certainly can't be said of CIB's immediate predecessor. Me, I like sex with vegetables, but I nurse this lingering paranoia that someday, some drunken night, I may get a radish between the sheets and discover it's homosexual. Thus I feel threatened by Coney Island Baby, just as I feel threatened by Valiums, Tuinals, Seconals, Quaaludes, and Compoz. Metal Machine Music, on the contrary, reinforces my sense of myself as a man. Under my blacklight presidential campaign poster of Hunter Thompson, I bolt upright in repose, my rifle casually draped cross my lap, listening to MMM and dreaming of My Lai as starring Fritz the Cat. So fuck downs, avoid Coney Island Baby like guys who wear green on Thursdays, and keep it (your fist) up tight.

http://www.rocknroll.net/loureed/articles/mmmbangs.html